Shell as Hard as Steel

First-person psychological horror inside an elevator you can't get out of.

You're an elevator repair technician, sent out on a night shift to put the elevator of the tallest office tower in the city back in service. On paper the job is simple: calibrate the elevator, work your way up floor by floor, and repair the traction system at the top.

But there's no getting out to check anything. To find out what's waiting on a floor, you deploy a camera you steer remotely and watch it on a grainy monitor. And to keep climbing you have to work out how high the next floor is: no two are the same distance apart, and the official plans are no use.

HOW YOU PLAY

Search. Deploy the camera and move through the floor with it. Advance, rotate, light the dark and zoom in, watching it all on the monitor.

Decipher. The height of your next stop is somewhere on the floor, in what was left behind by the people who got trapped inside. Find it, decipher it and commit it to memory; then type it into the information screen to set your destination.

Operate. Tension the lever, release the brake and launch the elevator upward. Get the height right and you arrive. Get it wrong and you're in free fall, with the emergency brake to pull before the cable snaps.

FEATURES

• A psychological horror experience that tightens with every floor.

• Decipher the height of every floor to recalibrate the elevator and keep climbing.

• Everything you see of the outside comes through a monitor. You don't walk the corridors; you examine them from a distance, with the limits of a security camera.

• Piece together, floor by floor, the story of the ones trapped inside.

• A corporate dystopia where the bureaucracy is the source of the horror.

THE PHILOSOPHY BEHIND THE GAME

The fate of the modern world: a shell as hard as steel. Society organizes itself around efficiency, calculation and control, and every institution ends up subordinate to that logic. The structures progress builds become so rational and so self-sufficient that they go on running by themselves, long after losing the purpose that created them. An order nobody fully governs any more, and one that shapes the life of the whole society living inside it.

None of the ones trapped inside ever made it back down.